Regular expresion to match urls JAVA

Question

I use RegexBuddy while working with regular expressions. From its library i copied the regular expression to match urls. I tested succesfully within regexbuddy. However, when I copied it as Javas String flavor and pasted it into java code it does not work. The next class prints false:

public class RegexFoo {

    public static void main(String[] args) {
        String regex = "\\b(https?|ftp|file)://[-A-Z0-9+&@#/%?=~_|!:,.;]*[-A-Z0-9+&@#/%=~_|]";
        String text = "http://google.com";
        System.out.println(IsMatch(text,regex));
}

    private static boolean IsMatch(String s, String pattern) {
        try {
            Pattern patt = Pattern.compile(pattern);
            Matcher matcher = patt.matcher(s);
            return matcher.matches();
        } catch (RuntimeException e) {
        return false;
    }     
}   
}

Does anyone what i am doing wrong?

Answer 1

Try the following regex string instead. Your test was probably done in a case insensitive manner. I have added the lowercase alphas as well as a proper string beginning placeholder.

String regex = "^(https?|ftp|file)://[-a-zA-Z0-9+&@#/%?=~_|!:,.;]*[-a-zA-Z0-9+&@#/%=~_|]";

This works too:

String regex = "\\b(https?|ftp|file)://[-a-zA-Z0-9+&@#/%?=~_|!:,.;]*[-a-zA-Z0-9+&@#/%=~_|]";

Note:

String regex = "<\\b(https?|ftp|file)://[-a-zA-Z0-9+&@#/%?=~_|!:,.;]*[-a-zA-Z0-9+&@#/%=~_|]>"; // matches <http://google.com&gt;

String regex = "<^(https?|ftp|file)://[-a-zA-Z0-9+&@#/%?=~_|!:,.;]*[-a-zA-Z0-9+&@#/%=~_|]>"; // does not match <http://google.com&gt;

Answer 2

I'll try a standard "Why are you doing it this way?" answer... Do you know about java.net.URL?

URL url = new URL( stringURL );

The above will throw a MalformedURLException if it can't parse the URL.

Answer 3

This works too:

String regex = "\\b(https?|ftp|file)://[-a-zA-Z0-9+&@#/%?=~_|!:,.;]*[-a-zA-Z0-9+&@#/%=~_|]";

Note:

String regex = "<\\b(https?|ftp|file)://[-a-zA-Z0-9+&@#/%?=~_|!:,.;]*[-a-zA-Z0-9+&@#/%=~_|]>"; // matches <http://google.com&gt;

String regex = "<^(https?|ftp|file)://[-a-zA-Z0-9+&@#/%?=~_|!:,.;]*[-a-zA-Z0-9+&@#/%=~_|]>"; // does not match <http://google.com&gt;

So probably the first one is more useful for general use.

Answer 4

Or you could use

Pattern patt = Pattern.compile(pattern, Pattern.CASE_INSENSITIVE);

to avoid changing the regex to match both uppercase and lowercase.

Answer 5

When using regular expressions from RegexBuddy's library, make sure to use the same matching modes in your own code as the regex from the library. If you generate a source code snippet on the Use tab, RegexBuddy will automatically set the correct matching options in the source code snippet. If you copy/paste the regex, you have to do that yourself.

In this case, as others pointed out, you missed the case insensitivity option.